Daphne Oz quotes:

The Dorm Room Diet is nothing like the conventional diets you may have tried in the past. It offers guidelines for creating a healthy lifestyle on your own, without the daunting restrictions of a quick-fix diet.

Figuring out how to eat healthfully on your own without your parents' guidance is one of the hardest lessons you must learn when you leave home for college.

Developing a diet that is healthful, balanced, and appropriate for your particular caloric needs is easy enough and is absolutely critical to establishing a healthful lifestyle that incorporates proper nutrition, adequate fitness, and mental resilience.

At my heaviest, I was 5'8" and 175 pounds. I ate well, but in too large quantities, and I rarely made a concerted effort to burn off the extra calories. I'd beat myself up about being overweight, even though I had the tools to be in shape. Then I'd resort to an unhealthy diet to lose the weight that was making me self-conscious.

Everyone has their own definition of a healthy lifestyle, and mine has come to mean making health a priority but not an obsession.

While fad diets might seem like the quick-fix solution to lose weight, they won't help you get healthy in the long run.

I have two pairs of stretchy maternity leggings and jeans, which I will never give up, because once you experience an elastic band for a waist, you will never go back.

My dad, who is a heart surgeon, works with many adult patients who did not take good care of their bodies in their formative years. He is able to teach them how to break old eating and exercise habits and reshape their bodies, but not without a great deal of resistance.

Exercise is important, but exercise in a gym is not important. Go and take a walk outside. Skip the umpteenth coffee date and go for a hike instead. Take the stairs. Walk your errands.

After my first week of no wheat, my stomachaches were gone, my mucous cleared up, and I felt incredibly energetic. My headaches were also less frequent and less severe, and I had lost 3 pounds, most of it swelling and water weight my body had been holding onto as part of its response to the wheat products in my diet.

A gluten-free diet still allows you access to almost every fruit and vegetable, a variety of grains and legumes, your pick of dairy products, fresh meats and fish and a whole slew of special gluten-free delights to satisfy your pretzel-bagel-muffin-doughnut craving.

My mom is a great cook, and family dinners were a must growing up, even if that meant eating at 10 p.m. when my dad got home from the hospital. It's where we did our family bonding.

My parents always wanted me to know why eating healthfully was important to overall performance, probably to drown out my whining for junk food.

I didn't grow up eating meat - I was a vegetarian until I was 18.

Worrying is just a prayer for the worst possible scenario.

I am inspired by working moms. Mothers who somehow balance the demands of their many lives - professional, familial, personal, and interior - and still manage to make time to have fun and invest in themselves! This is a huge challenge that I look forward to taking on.

Food is medicine! We have forgotten that!

Ultimately, it's how you approach things in life that puts a smile on your face.

Standards are what you hold for yourself, too. If I don't hold those standards with friends, colleagues, and lovers, I can't hold them to their relationships.

In addition to that, having the items I needed to foster the breastfeeding process and give me an opportunity to bond with my baby in this way was something that I felt was so important in my life and my experience as a first-time mom. I love that I am able to play a role in giving that joy and support to the moms we will be helping.

A 'diet' is simply an individual's eating regimen: it doesn't have to mean the restrictive plan we've come to associate this word with.

I was a good 30 pounds overweight throughout high school, and it wasn't until I was going away to college that I really wanted to make sure I was doing everything possible to feel as confident as I could.

I do what I do because my favorite thing is to learn.

Make sure you eat whole foods that are good for your entire body. This doesn't mean that you can't enjoy your food or make room for plenty of indulgences. But your conscious goal has to be to eat for long term health and what you do most of the time is what really counts.

I am proactive and looking to change my own behavior rather than others' - which is generally much more successful!

If you have expectations, you try to put your standards on someone else's behavior. The fact is you can't control anyone but yourself, so creating standards, as opposed to expectations, keeps the ball in your court.

I learned that pretending you don't have feelings makes you feel unhappy and unfulfilled and, ultimately, is what really makes you vulnerable because you are hiding from the truth.

More than anything, having adventures with my siblings and spending time with my family and my husband make me happy.

Don't make a different meal for every person, but make buildable meals. And, I do this with my kids, try to expand their palates gently.

The only reason I write at all is because I am going through, and growing through, something in my life I want to share with others through my personal experiences.

Anyone who knows our family knows this: we eat ALL the time!

If we make wholesome, healthy food accessible and affordable for everyone, we make the choice to be healthy an easy one.

I wanted to lose 30 pounds healthfully and still be able to enjoy my college experience. Having succeeded in doing just that, I wanted to share my experiences with others who could benefit from my direct knowledge of the difficulty of trying to balance college life with being healthy. It became a journey about healthy lifestyle choices, including tips and tricks for creating a new relationship with food where I was in control and could learn to love food healthfully again.

I want to be a vehicle to help people connect the dots that let them make their lives healthier, happier, more beautiful, and more fun.

I love to look at my life and look at what I can do better, how I can contribute more and where I can push myself.

I have been very, very lucky because I have my health, a wonderful husband, family, and friends, and I get to do what I love.

Fun for me is to take what I learn and teach others in a way that is accessible and applicable in their own lives.

We all have so much access to the information on the Internet and in books, but we don't necessarily get that information in a usable way so that we can turn information into action.

Your life shouldn't be anything short of spectacular.

If I don't get to go to the gym, walking is the answer.

Keeping stationary drains your brain, but moving around shows you new things, new inspiration, and keeps the blood moving.

Keep on moving: any motion is forward motion. You can always course-correct.

Don't get stuck and don't worry.

I am doing what I am supposed to be doing right now. I smile knowing that I have the most wonderful husband, family, and friends. I work with friends whom I can learn from and whom I respect and who respect me.

I get to help people create lives that make them happier and healthier than they were yesterday. I knock on wood that my family is healthy and happy and love each other.

Having been to culinary school, the single greatest asset I learned there was how to cut and chop properly. It's an investment of money that will save you hours of time down the road, and hopefully some cut fingers.

This moment is precious and full of great potential: all we have to do is figure out the little changes that will make a huge impact on how wonderful life can be in this moment.

I have so many girlfriends in their twenties who live in a white box apartment, having mediocre meals with mediocre friends, waiting for the life they want to hit them in their forties or fifties. They are settling in the now - what's the point?

A wholesome family is one where there is a lot of love. It's living by example. It's acceptance of people at their core, but it's also pushing each other to be our best selves and try things we might not be good at.

Growing up in my family, it wasn't important that we always be the best; it was important that we were going to try to be our best and give it our all.

You can tell your kids they are perfect and don't need to change - which could cause insecurity when they recognize their own shortcomings - or tell them they are terrible, which would undermine their sense of self-worth and confidence. There's a happy middle ground.

The most imminent battle our generation is going to have to fight is food transparency: how food is made/grown, where it comes from, the quality of the source, and how it will effect our health long term.

We need to demand that our food is labeled, especially genetically modified foods, and learn how it is produced, processed, and grown.

We can try to reform healthcare, but the fact is if we don't have a healthy food source, we are only treating the symptoms and not the problems.

Tell your kids they are perfect the way they are, but they shouldn't stay where they are forever because growing, testing the limits, and evolving make life better and more fulfilling.

When I was young and growing up overweight, I believed the "eaten" was more powerful than the "eater," meaning the food was more powerful than I was.

If you live your life all out today, not only is it fun, but you are preventing a midlife crisis.

I tried every diet under the sun and none of them worked but, more importantly, they were robbing me of my love of food.